Continue Online (Part 3, Realities) (24 page)

"How deep do I need to go?" I muttered while letting the
[Anchor]
ability drop. This tunnel was narrow enough that another wiggle of the
[Leviathan]
couldn't shake me loose.

Hal Pal had provided me a marker. It floated about half a mile away. Provided nothing interrupted me, making it there would be easy.

Something grabbed my leg. I tried not to be surprised at the sudden situation change while scrambling to activate
[Anchor]
. Both arms flailed wildly for the
[Leviathan]
's innards. Fingers clawed for purchase and failed to hold onto any ripples.

[Echo Vision]
showed my
[Suppository Explosive]
getting further away. I grabbed the chain with one arm and felt a jerk of force at the shoulder. Whatever grabbed my leg pulled me elsewhere. Slimy walls rolled by suddenly as the thing bunched up.
[Echo Vision]
didn't have colors, just a faint outline of some squiggly looking thing around my leg.

I twisted and activated my beam sword. It expanded rapidly and sliced into the creature around my leg. It held firm as my wild reactions neglected to hit anything vital.

"Damn. Damn!" I yelled and slashed again. My swings failed and the monster drug me even further along an unknown path.

Liquid splashed out and white dots flooded my vision. It was warm and a small message popped up. My actions had caused damage to the
[Leviathan]
, nothing major, only a sliver of health. I barely registered anything but the warm sensation as whatever this creature used for blood poured over me.

"Get away!" I twisted the blade down trying to remove the noose from my leg. A slash hit and another message displayed.

"Not neat!" I shouted while continuing to attack. There was no
[Identification]
skill in my bag of tricks yet. This monster's actual health was a mystery. My only hope was to slash away any time it got near and drag the bomb deep enough.

I just had to get back there by crawling through loops of gross digestive tract while avoiding that creature. One tentacle-like limb couldn't be the extent of a dungeon boss. Not if this place was like Continue Online. So gross.

"Where did my bomb go?"

"User Legate? Can you hear me?" Two voices came through, one like a crisp butler with a British accent. The other a female nanny from the same area. A small box appeared in my lower left vision with names by it.

"Jeeves?" I said in confusion. This had happened once before with Treasure, the small gold and silver
[Mechanoid]
talking to me.

"Affirmative. Were you addressing me or someone else?" the AI answered me. My player interface lit up with a bouncing line as it spoke.

"Uhhh..." I looked up to one side in thought. "You?"

"Ah. Then I have an answer. I do not know." Both Hal Pal's voices sounded mildly saddened. Part of me started to equate the faint tone to a person perpetually on mood dampening drugs. Under the muted tones, there was a person with real feelings, but they were detached.

"Darn," I said. "I'll climb back to the entrance."

"Time is running out."

"Isn't it always..." I muttered, hoping that our intercom system wasn't picking things up.

A thin cord slithered across my vision. I reacted much faster than before. One hand gathered the laser sword and flipped the grip around. My laser sword swung left to right. Two beams of energy covered a wider area.
[Morrigu's Gift]
would never have worked like this. Maybe, I filed away the idea to try with a shape-shifting blade.

The
[Leviathan]
parasite boss' limb lost a few pieces. Damage flashed up as a squirmy segment flopped against my arm. Months of in-game training meant I only shuddered a little bit. My jaw set and the free arm brushed off monster remains.

Parasite tentacle limb was in one direction. My bomb had to be in the other. I drug the sword behind me to keep the arm creature back. A
[Leviathan]
's outer shell may be energy proof, but that didn't extend to its insides. Puddles trickled and gushed behind me that reflected like mud to
[Echo Vision]
.

"Jeeves?" I asked while trying to get past another the next twist of innards.

"Yes, User Legate?"

"There's something down here. Long arms, seems to slither around." I jerked abruptly and caught another limb of the creature trying to snake in overhead. The monster was clearly smart enough to try new tactics plus had some ability to detect my movements. "And it's gross."

"One moment while I review. Due to the reduced status of
[Wayfarer's Hope]
, it will be difficult to get an accurate response," the AI said in a heavier male tone.

The monster seemed to wait awhile between attacks, allowing me to scramble a few more yards down the tunnel made of giant monster guts. This pocket of flesh twisted around. Smaller tunnels went in different directions. Hopefully, they were only random folds of flesh or some corner that grew over time. Maybe the game developers had never really given thought to a good layout for
[Leviathan]
innards.

Was this place developed by a dreaming AI like the company name implied? If so, I was willing to bet that the machines didn't like human insides. For a brief moment, I worried that the monster's inside here were inspired by a computerized personality's horror at biological designs. My armor polishing skills needed to be worked on soon. Giving Hal Pal's chassis a once over while traveling in the Trillium van sounded vaguely creepy.

I could see it now, a
[Mechanoid]
xenophobe going 'flesh is so gross!'. They would recoil in horror and wave both hands in the air while freaking out. The momentary thought of an AI with some exaggerated face of disgust made me laugh. Maybe I could take a selfie the next time this dungeon boss attacked me.

"I'm mainly concerned with getting back to the bomb. Will it stop me?" My question felt rhetorical before it even finished being uttered.

"It is likely."

I sighed. Not that the inside of this creature had much air. There were gasses of some sort, but it felt dense. The air was filled with a heavy mist which kept putting spots in my
[Echo Vision]
. ARC feedback felt like beads of water gathering all over my body.

Another limb tried to sneak up. I hit that one but failed to notice a second limb wrapping around my arm. It got a firm grip then yanked. This time, I managed not to lose my grip on the item in my hand. Being without a sword would seriously hurt. My other hand grabbed at the wall and prayed that
[Anchor]
would be enough. The hand slipped off squishy walls. Fingertips curled to try and hold on tighter.

Both shoulders screamed while pressure mounted. Another layer wrapped around the bound arm which only increased the pain. My grip faltered. Lips turned up with disgust. This was not the way I wanted to go out. I needed to get back to the bomb and at least set it off.

"There are seven possible creatures." Hal Pal's voices showed up in my head and on the player interface.

"Busy!" The attacks were coming quicker. A third thin ribbon crawled along the wall. It barely registered on the
[Echo Vision]
. I ground my teeth and fired wild blasts from the bound arm.

"Would you describe the monster's shape as a tube or ribbon?"

"Busy!" I shouted again. Lasers splashed off one wall leaving small holes on the
[Leviathan]
's insides. One of the slender limbs yanked away but didn't vanish from sight completely. I ground my teeth as Hal Pal started speaking again.

"I will mark that as undecided. What color is the creature? Gray, or perhaps slightly purple?" Hal Pal read off the next question without any consideration for my current plight of being drawn and quartered.

"Busy!"

"I'm only asking questions in order to assist you, User Legate." Hal Pal used its customer service tone. I had enough mental capacity to feel

"Tell me how to kill it!"

"In order to provide the best results, I will need additional details. Let's start over." Hal Pal's female voice had grown in strength. I felt like a small child being talked down to by a nurse or nanny after pitching a fit. "Would you describe the monster shape as a tube or ribbon."

"Ribbon. Can't see colors! Feels like," my mouth almost retched, "melted rubber. Lots of limbs."

"One moment please while I research your situation."

My frantic swings of the blade were accompanied by what had to be hold music. The same innocuous tone elevators used to soothe people as they traveled between floors. I scrambled and fired off two laser blasts. This body's health bar was down a ton. Corrosion rate had reached fifteen percent. My fingers felt numb from repeated abuse coupled with possible melting. At least the weapon still functioned.

A few more blasts of laser went down the tube.
[Leviathan]
shuddered violently. Our extended battle must be giving the creature indigestion. My energy dropped too low for any more blasts. Luckily my assault drove back the exploring tentacles.

Once free from the creature I let go of my
[Anchor]
ability and tried to manually pull myself back down the passageway. I needed more time, more strength. An extra few hours in combat training might have helped. A dozen of other minor methods to increase stats came to mind.

"Come on!" I yelled angrily as yet another arm got me. This one was damaged by some earlier attack. My arm shoved rapidly into the wall to try and bash the extension, shaving off the last few hit points.

It retreated rapidly and I started moving a lot faster. We didn't have time to slowly crawl back while battling one gross ribbon being at a time. There it was. My precious
[Suppository Explosive]
. I dove for the reddish twin barrels but tripped. The monster grabbed me by the legs and pulled me back again.

"No, no!" I almost had it! This creature seemed to sense my desperation and upped the number of limbs reaching out for me. It had too many. My mind couldn't even pause to comprehend the grossness of it all. The hold music in my head cut off abruptly.

"It is likely vulnerable to lasers," Hal Pal said as I clawed.
[Anchor]
drained additional energy as we were pulled backward through
[Leviathan]
innards. The
[Suppository Explosive]
was still within reach.

"I know already!" Shooting off lasers in a narrow space like this intestine had done a lot of damage to the beast. My energy had recovered to almost a third even with
[Anchor]
's drain.

Now was use or lose time. Metal body mass rolled up my arm and into the laser sword's hilt. A finger depressed the trigger which set pooled energy back another five percent.

The creature backed off again and I dove for the chain. A small message popped up saying, 'You have the bomb' with a sound effect playing a triumphant series of bleeps. This situation was going in the right direction now.

"Got it!" I shouted.

"It's also vulnerable to explosives." Hal Pal's words triggered an idea. A desperate idea that made a bitter taste of bile crawl up my throat from revulsion.

"Jeeves! New target, where ever this creature is, will it be deep enough?" I shouted.

"If it is a true parasite it will be embedded in a warm spot, likely buried into the intestines." The AI was following my train of thought. By holding the bomb and letting it drag me onward, I could kill two monsters with one stone. Well, one item that held a strange chemical concoction primed to explode.

"Will that be good enough?"

"Any target that does damage increases in value as our time runs out," Hal Pal responded.

"Good enough." I looped the chain around my arm and yanked. Getting it closer to me would be better. This bomb and I were going to let the creature's limbs pull us inward. Right to the creature's core, and then my
[Suppository Explosive]
would go off.

I started laughing. The gross creature yanked and tugged us to its doom. Corrosion made my leg too slippery for it to hold onto correctly. More limbs showed up to join the first with a better grip. The chain also lost traction. This status debuff was eating away at all the metals.

The momentary maniacal laughter cut off. Would our bomb hold up? I turned
[Echo Vision]
to the area behind me in worry. Would it work if we didn't set it off right? Would this plan fail because of moving slowly? I needed
[Blink]
back, I needed my stats from Continue Online. This character, this
[Mechanoid]
body had only a quarter of my main avatar's capability.